keychris

Until I read this thread I'd never even thought it possible that birthday cake had a distinct flavour, or that it would sold in a bottle! What a strange world we live in - birthday cakes in my house are whatever the birthdayee wants - my eldest turned 13 a week ago and wanted chocolate mousse. I was like great, cool I'll make a beautiful entremet and he goes "dad no that would suck I just wanted chocolate mousse in a bowl" ... Ouch to my ego 🤣

how much do you need to add to taste it? there's literally like 0.1g of cocoa butter on the outside of a bonbon, so how much flavouring does PCB have to add to that to get it to a level you can actively taste? I just feel that the amount you need to add so that you can taste it effectively is rendering it to "not cocoa butter" in my head.

ditto. that machinery is just amazing.

I hate how they market this stuff. "Richer in pectin and natural fruit sugars, blah blah is less brittle". Yes, that's because you've added fruit powder to the cocoa butter. It's not pure cocoa butter any more. "No added colours" ... wtf? cocoa butter isn't red and orange and black naturally, so clearly there ARE added colours. What they mean is something like "no added things that you might perceive as nasty like titanium dioxide, don't worry it's all fruit based" I don't see the point of flavouring the cocoa butter, to me cocoa butter is purely decoration, not flavour.

practice. lots and lots of practice.

mother's day gifts for my children's school mother's day stall

honestly I don't have time in my life to spray moulds two cavities at a time 🤣

Mask the base with the chocolate on a stick. Spray the white. Remove the mask. Do the black pupil. Leave to set. Do the cornea with whatever technique he uses.

You can see here white chocolate (32%), on side. No pooling or dripping out of the mould, temper was spot on (in my not so humble opinion 😂). Room temperature was around 19-20C.

additionally, if you leave the mold upside down to set up and then scrape, you'll be left with a flat surface at the edge, whereas that lip actually gives a slightly better surface area for the base to adhere to when you cap the mold.

Of course it works. If you want to speed up the process throw exactly one callet into the untempered chocolate at working temperature and you'll seed it from that whilst stirring it.

... that would have needed a sledge hammer to get through 🤣

Yup, melt it out, stir whilst cooling to 31-32C and you should be fine. I melt all of mine back to 45C and retemper like this with no issues. I store mine vacuum sealed to protect from moisture , they last for ages.

I have a HVLP gun with a 0.8mm nozzle, basically a cheap version of an iwata HVLP, if I had a larger compressor I would have no issues spraying whole moulds at once. With my current Iwata smartjet pro I can only spray maybe a line of cavities at a time and they'll need to be sprayed a second time to achieve full coverage.

hole in the middle indicates not enough gluten development (no network of gluten to trap the air) and over-proving. Bread can be as fickle as chocolate

but you have an eztemper 😛

that definitely helps but you still can get evaporation even if you do this (I do this for all my fillings and some still shrink over time)

Yeah it's caused by evaporation from the filling. Not sure how to prevent other than changing the filling to have less water?

Felchlin has a number of vegan friendly dark couvertures

what temperature is the chocolate when you believe it's overcrystallised? It's probably crystallising at an accelerated rate (relative to chocolate in a melting tank) simply because it's cooling. You won't stay at working temperature the whole time you're working with the chocolate, because the crystal propagation is not static, it's always happening, even at working temp, it's just that you're propagating the right crystals at that temperature. You *have* to warm it slightly to melt out a portion of those crystals and eventually you're going to have warmed it too far to stay in temper and you have to re-temper. Always take a test on a spatula or scraper and if the test sets up fine without streaks or bloom, you're still good to use the chocolate regardless of the temperature. If you have a melting tank, you can easily demonstrate the crystal propagation: just temper your chocolate, set the temperature to 32C and walk away. In an hour it'll be a thick mass. Working temperature isn't "work forever at this temperature".

the kitchen-aid attachment spins faster than a pro model, means the product can slide instead of roll sometimes, but you can still do it. I've used the CW one as well and it worked, but it's blowing just air, not cooled air, so if you've got a warm day you might want to skip panning that day, unless you want to hack it to go through some dry ice or something. Batch size is the issue you run into with the kitchen-aid and even the CW one, if you're looking for volume then the larger Selmi model is the way to go, but you'd need money to burn Panning is bloody noisy, too!

tahini with roasted sesame seeds is so easy to make at home if you have an oven and a blender!

Frankenrabbit!

ditto. I only really use guitar sheet for sealing moulds if I'm in the mood.